Quote

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Respond
Intuition
Discover
Call
Learn
Action
Way
Improvisation
Muse

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Image
Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around...The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of just anything.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
Stephen Nachmanovitch